Local Treasure

As the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow celebrates its 40th anniversary, Pat Parker talks to one of the show’s best-loved experts, Lamarsh’s Bunny Campione, about her years on TV, her career in antiques and her unusual family history

- Pat Parker

BUNNY CAMPIONE has been an expert on the Antiques Roadshow for 32 years. She specialises in dolls and automata, but sits on the Miscellaneous Table, where she’s been presented with everything from a stuffed toad named Tubby to a rare 1920s Steiff clown bear, which sold for more than £20,000 (Bunny was at the Christie’s auction, hiding behind a pillar, to make sure it reached its valuation price).

It’s the unpredictability she loves about the programme, which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. ‘The Miscellaneous Table is the most difficult of all, because you can be presented with absolutely anything,’ Bunny says. A memorable highlight was a Faberge vodka cup which a woman had bought for 20p from a car boot sale, and was valued at £2,000. Then there was the anatomically correct naked male doll which reduced her to tongue-tied embarrassment.

Bunny, who lives with her husband on a 25-acre nature reserve overlooking the picturesque Stour Valley at Lamarsh, near Bures, is great company as we chat – fun, frank and friendly. Her original ambition was to act, but her uncle, film star Stewart Granger, talked her out of it. ‘He said, “Darling, it’s the most ghastly profession. Don’t you dare become an actress!’” explains Bunny.

Yet Bunny bears quite a strong physical resemblance to the Hollywood star and his films were her specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind four years ago. ‘He was my hero; I adored him,’ says Bunny. ‘He was divine and incredibly funny. He looked like a film star; he had this aura about him.’ She still has – and, incredibly, still fits into – an American patchwork shirt Granger gave her when she was ten.